Wrapping up....

This post was titled "Abandonment Issues" about 2 months ago, now it's just the year end wrap up.  I apologize for the lack of blogging from September on.  The months just slipped through my hands and mostly my hands were busy with making Christmas gifts from Thanksgiving on.  I couldn't blog the projects I was working on because the people who read this blog are the ones who were receiving them.  And it just seemed like too much effort most days.  But with the sun coming back and the days getting longer (albeit unnoticeably at this point) I have found that my resolutions for 2013 include blogging more.  It also includes learning to play the piano, knitting up more wonderful things I have in my stash, learning how to dye my own yarn, growing some new things in my garden like shelling beans and peas, making some of those Pinterest ideas realities and putting all my remaining energy into getting pregnant.  So without further ado here is a photo round up of the last months of 2012...

In September we went to Cannon Beach and...did nothing!  But an enjoyable nothing. :)  We walked the beach twice a day, knitted, re-watched both seasons of Downton Abbey, ate ice cream for dinner and relaxed.  I started, for the third time, a shawl for myself and it's going much better finally.  The first part of the vacation was sunny and warm...the second half was foggy then cloudy and cold.  And our vacation ended with a beautiful sunset that I couldn't stop taking pictures of.  Aaah, I love the Oregon Coast.  (The first two pictures I took with the iPad!)

In the middle of September Mom and I joined some friends from work and visited a U-Pick blueberry patch.  We picked two buckets full of blueberries and got a free bucket of pears!  The pears and berries were so delicious that Mom and I went back later and picked some more.  We froze lots of blueberries to eat all winter long.

Then the first week of October the weather turned cold!  So cold that it froze a couple of nights and we noticed that the garden had been hit.  So in a single night we harvested everything!!  Pumpkins, squash, peppers, tomatoes, sunflower heads and any melons that were left.  It was exhausting but worth getting the fruits of the summer labor in the house for safe keeping.

It looked like a cornucopia had barfed in our house....and still does to a degree.  We slowly have made our way through some of the squashes and the chickies are getting most of the pumpkins.

And then we had an early turkey dinner to feast on our homegrown food!  Other than the turkey, olives and gravy we grew that meal on the table!!  Sweet potatoes, carrots, mashed potatoes and squash all from the garden...

Then I was invited to a Halloween party and made some scary treats to take with me...

Wicked witch fingers that looked more like real fingers before they were baked.

 Magic pretzel wands.

 Chocolate peanut butter acorns.

 And pumpkin fudge.

That gets us to November when fall decided to show it's best and brightest colors of the season...in our backyard!

And now December.  It was, of course, time to bake some more, so for a work potluck I made...

Apple Cider Snicker-doodles

Peppermint Snowballs

And a bar cookies that was oatmeal chocolate chip cookie mix with a layer of dark chocolate fudge and more cookie mix and mint M&Ms on top...all in all too rich to make again!

Besides baking, December was filled with knitting.  I made a pair of fingerless gloves for my Aunt Norma (who turned 90 this year!)

I also made 3 pair of gloves for my cousins...and never took a single picture of them!  Seriously!  I had 6 mittens to knit in less than 4 weeks, so that left little time to document their production.  I was casting on the last mitten in church at Christmas Eve Mass and knit all day Christmas day to finish it.  Then I promptly wrapped them up and gave them away.  :(  I was even there as everyone opened them and didn't take a picture of the three together!  My camera malfunctioned at the end of the night, so I'll blame it on that.  Luckily Melinda took a picture of hers, just imagine two other pairs with the colors in the cuffs changed around...

So it is with camera issues and a new list of resolutions that I enter 2013.  May it be filled with more blogs than 2012!

The Part of My Life That's Been on Hold

With all the traveling my normal life has been getting neglected.  My garden needed attention.  The apricots we got needed to be made into jam, but first the old jam jars needed to be emptied.  The living room looked VERY lived in.  And I had tickets to a concert that I had bought when life didn't look so busy.  Plus the Olympics were coming and I had a pattern that I wanted to try and complete within the time frame.  It's something the website Ravelry does every Olympics, and though I wasn't joining a team, I wanted to try and do it.  And then there's all the overtime at work...not enough hours in the day.

First the concert...

It was the weekend after we'd gotten back and also on a weekend that I worked.  I had arranged with my supervisor to work the Sunday after the concert for me, but it made it so that she was working her birthday.  :(  So I bought an ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins to make it a bit better and to let her know how much I appreciated what she did.  So I worked the Saturday of the concert, until 5 PM, and then we drove straight over to the White River Amphitheater...in Auburn.  The concert started at 8 PM and there's always a band to it off, so we made it before Florence + The Machine came out!  I have been a big fan of her music for about a year or more and was excited to see she was coming to Washington State.  A few months before the concert Heather at work asked me if I'd heard about Florence + The Machine.  I said, did I have both her CD's?  Umm, yes.  Was I going to see her concert this summer?  Umm, yes.  Had I read the book, seen the movie and gotten the T-shirt?  Umm, well no, because that's not the medium of entertainment we're talking about, but the equivalent?  Yes.

And a couple of videos...

Cosmic Love (Started taping it a bit late...)
Shake It Out (Though the audio sounds kinda crappy...)

Then I needed to sample the merchandise...

After all, I go on a vacation and buy lots of wine and gin, what's left but to try it.  So the Twilight sparkling Syrah seemed to go best with what we call "Smashed Tomatoes" at my house.  It's a bit of a tweak on this recipe from the Italian Dish (who is someone I idolize in all her photography and italian cooking ways, but I digress).  The meal was fantastical.


And then the garden...

All the potato plants had started to die back, meaning it was time to harvest them.  And boy was it ever!  We completely filled a 7 gallon tub with potatoes and when I weighed it on my bathroom scale it came out to 48 pounds!  Of potatoes!  We also picked a second crop of green beans that didn't turn out as tasty as the first crop.  They had gone too long and the seeds were too big and mealy.  The weeds had gotten crazy and so I attacked those to keep my vegetables from having to compete too much.  The squash all look like they are going to be huge come the end of September and I even found a cucumber growing in what looked like the squash.  It really had just vined it's way over there, but I had thought I wasn't going to get any cucumbers, so it was a pleasant surprise.  We also had our first cantaloupes and watermelons growing!  The past couple of years any melons I had tried to raise were too small by fall to be edible.  So this year I covered their part of the bed with plastic to keep them warmer.  It sure worked!

So getting to the apricots...

Mom had gotten a huge box of apricots in trade for some eggs and we were determined to make some apricot-pineapple jam.  It had been years since we'd made any and the jars in our pantry were definitely too old.  I pulled out all the jars of jam we weren't going to eat or were old and dumped the contents.  We had a whole dishwasher full of jars to use.  Mom had thought she was going to make them low sugar, but the cherry jelly we'd tried that way was really runny.  So she just went all out with the sugar so that the jam would set up well.  Oh. My. Gosh.  That is the best jam you have ever eaten.  It's not too sweet and perfectly set.  Just freakin delicious.


But what about the Olympics?

See the knitting!

See!  Watching the Olympics and knitting.

I had the weekend off at the beginning of the Olympics, so everything started well.  I was knitting the Bella Mittens, the ones she wore in the first movie when she almost gets hit by the van.  I know, nobody except weird knitters like me seem to remember these things, so here's a picture of them from the movie.

Like I said, it all started fine.  I started casting on during the opening ceremony and by the end of the weekend I had 3/4 of the first mitten done.  The problem came when I had to be at work again.  I calculated that if I had the first mitten done by the end of the first week, I'd be on track.  So Friday of the first week neared and I wasn't quite done.  I got to the end of the pattern, tied off my yarn, wove in the ends and found out the mitten was too short.  Le sigh.  (Well, more of an "ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!)  I promptly cut open the end of the mitten and pulled the yarn back to before the shaping of the end, add another entire repeat of the cable and finished the mitten again.  I left the thumb until I was done with the other mitten.  So I started the second mitten at the beginning of the week and then knit nothing until Friday.  Seriously.  Long story short, they weren't done by the end of the Olympics.  But I did finish them and technically the closing ceremonies are still on the DVR and I haven't watched all of them, so....I win?  Here they are in their completed glory!

Luckily with all the busyness there was a light at the end of the tunnel.  A trip to Cannon Beach where I did whatever I wanted, which was a whole lot of nothing!  :)